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When we recently detailed how to boost the storage space in a MacBook Air with a replacement solid state drive module, some readers asked what it would be like to swap the hard drive in an older MacBook with a similarly speedy SSD. We decided to investigate, and as it turns out, thanks to a common 2.5" drive size and widely available external enclosures, the swap is quicker, easier, and cheaper than the one for a MacBook Air.

Depending on the age of your machine and in some cases BTO drive options, the amount of the speedup will vary. Still, even our old original Intel MacBook—which, as we'll explain later, actually represents a worst case scenario—went from just barely usable to actually productive in just a few hours. Here, we'll tell you how to perform the same upgrade.

Upgrade considerations

For this how-to, we had at our disposal an original 2.0GHz Core Duo (yup, 32-bit) white MacBook. It recently had some major repair work due to a faulty expanding battery. Apple Care replaced nearly everything, including the keyboard, bottom casing, battery, and optical drive. In fact, the only original equipment is the LCD, LCD housing, and logic board.

Unlike the iBook before it, Apple designed MacBooks to make upgrading the hard drive (and the RAM) relatively simple, so this machine has already seen a few upgrades over the last several years. That includes maxing the installed RAM to 2GB (from 512MB) and gradually increasing the hard drive capacity. It originally came equipped with an 80GB 5400rpm drive, but recently had a monster 500GB 7200RPM Seagate drive stuffed inside.

The MacBook can't run Lion, thanks to its practically ancient 32-bit processor, but it does run the latest version of Snow Leopard. It also has Microsoft Office 2011, iLife '11, and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 installed. It's not the fastest Mac on the planet, but for many tasks it is a serviceable machine. Still, when doing something more than reading e-mail or browsing a few webpages, performance slows to a crawl once the 2GB RAM limit is hit and Mac OS X starts paging virtual memory to and from the hard disk.

Given that everything else is already maxed out, we wanted to upgrade to an SSD in order to squeeze a bit more life out of this laptop. If you have an older computer that already has the maximum RAM but still uses a hard drive, and you're not in the market for a new computer anytime soon, you can give it a boost with an SSD upgrade.

One last thing to keep in mind is that SSDs are still significantly more expensive than HDDs for comparable storage capacity. Our old MacBook already had a fairly massive 500GB capacity, but the drive only contains about 130GB of data. We ordered an OWC 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro 3G drive to install and test for this how-to, and you can see how prices compare in our chart below:

If your data storage needs aren't too great, or if you keep iTunes, iPhoto, or other large media libraries on external drives already, you can upgrade to an SSD for a fairly reasonable price. The 240GB SSD we chose is a pricey upgrade for such an old machine, to be honest. But as we'll discuss later, the speed improvement was worth it to us.

If you're looking for massive storage on the cheap though, SSD is definitely not the way to go. But you might install an SSD and move the existing hard drive into an inexpensive external enclosure. (This also makes the whole installation process very simple and fast.) After updating the MacBook, we ended up with a 500GB portable backup drive.

Let's get started.

Installation: two screwdrivers and an SSD

Everything we need to swap an SSD into a MacBook, including the SSD, an external 2.5" enclosure, and some tiny screwdrivers.

The installation process for the drive itself is straightforward: remove the laptop battery and a small bracket to access the internal drive bay, take out the current HDD, swap in the OWC SSD, and put the bracket and battery back in place. Depending on your comfort level, you should be able to do this in 10-15 minutes.

Moving data to the new SSD was fairly quick and painless. We used an external enclosure to clone the MacBook's boot drive to the new SSD before installing it. Alternately, you could install Mac OS X fresh and restore from a Time Machine backup or pull data from the boot volume using Migration Assistant. If you are concerned that your boot volume has become overgrown with digital cruft, you could even reinstall software manually and copy over any critical data from your old boot volume as needed.

We think our 'clone then install' method is a good compromise between safe and fast.